It IS wonderful plot construction, which I think could be supplemented for killdeer situation-comedy purposes (because these guys are definitely stars) by a comic "post-epilogue" involving rebellious teenage killdeer (or simply slacker killdeer) informing their parents that: a) the decision to improvise the deceptive broken wing act was entirely their own and therefore irrelevant to the adolescents' lives; and b) they did not ask to be born. Or something lighter and/or different than that. (Suggestions are hereby respectfully solicited.)

Anyway, the killdeer performance on display is one case where seeing almost isn't believing. Yesterday we attended a very moving theatrical performance in NYC by a San Francisco actress/acting teacher named Shelley Mitchell in a piece called Talking With Angels. Ms. Mitchell was unbelievably good. The killdeer was much, much better.

Thanks very much for the good knowledge, David. The killdeer inhabit the shorelines here for much of the year, just as they do in Florida, where it seems Stevens may have encountered one, on one of his Southern vacations, lo these more than 100 years ago now. How time flies for poetry and killdeer. Anyway, hearing that sharp piping call of the killdeer, I got to thinking about the Stevens poem, and wondering fancifully whether one might imagine the bird was whistling on the wind, or with the wind, or simply identifying itself to the universe by announcing its own name -- all poetic fancies, as I say. Anyway the poem is more about the bird, and about the transitoriness of beauty ("Here for just a/while" was meant to be saying either "just stopped in for a visit", or, perhaps, "here to bless us and the earth with its existence for no more than just a little while"), than about the prior poem or these several fancies, in this great metatextual echo-chamber of words repeating words no bird could or would in any case ever care about, written on the wind.

We've got plenty of killdeer in Wisconsin, too. I saw one perform the wounded dance a year or so ago when my dog got too close to her nest. Thanks for "the metatextual echo-chamber of words." I wrote a poem once titled "Honey in the Hive of Language," about walking past a building full of classrooms in session and listening to all the different voices & subjects blending beautifully in the air.